Happy Pi Day: How pie, Einstein and Stephen Hawking connect

Whether you like pie, pizza or you’re just a big fan of Babylonian equation – it’s Pi Day!

Besides a day to eat and celebrate, today is also Einstein’s birthday (he’d be turning 138 years old) and today marks the one year anniversary of death of Stephan Hawkins and Google announced they were able to compute Pi to 31.4 trillion decimal places, setting a new Guinness World Record Thursday morning.

Pi (π) was first used approximately 4,000 years ago by the ancient Babylonians to calculate the circumference of a circle to its diameter, the symbol was introduced in 1706 by mathematician William Jones and made more popular by Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler 30 years later. The number can go on forever but is usually rounded to 3.14.

The number was first connected to March 14 by former physicist Larry Shaw in 1988 at the Exploratorium Museum in San Fransisco, celebrating with fruit pie and tea. Shaw led parades there yearly until his passing in 2017. In 2009, the House of Representiatives in the U.S. passed a resolution marking March 14 as national Pi Day.